Riff Instead of an Anthem: How Rock and Metal Became the Sound of Football Stadiums
Seven notes on a detuned guitar — and a country that lost the words to its own national anthem. We look at why it is rock and metal, rather than pop or classical music, that became the main soundtrack of the terraces, from a Milan bar in 2003 to the 2026 World Cup.
There is a sound that cannot be mistaken for anything else: a seven-note riff, played on guitar through an octave pitch-shifter, that became the most recognisable stadium chant on the planet. And there is a fact that surprises many: the author of that riff had no idea he was writing an anthem for football terraces. Jack White was writing a dark, nervous track about surveillance and loneliness. Stadiums heard a battle cry in it.
The story of Seven Nation Army is the best illustration of just how strange, unpredictable and moving the relationship between rock music and football can be. It is not a marriage of convenience, as it is for pop artists with official tournament anthems. These are chance, almost always uncontrollable romances — born in a bar, on a terrace, in the garage of a musician who never thought about the ball at all.
Now, as the World Cup moves through stadiums in the United States, Mexico and Canada, and the terraces invent new sonic rituals every week, it is worth working out: how exactly has heavy, independent music — the kind that is supposedly meant to despise any mainstream collective euphoria — become inseparable from the most massive sport on Earth?
The Bar in Milan That Changed One Song’s History
If there were a textbook on the unpredictability of pop culture, the chapter on “Seven Nation Army” would be compulsory. The track opened The White Stripes' fourth album, Elephant, and was released as a single in February 2003. The duo’s record labels in the US and Britain did not even consider it a potential hit and wanted to release a different track from the album as the single instead — a story Jack White himself would later recall with a laugh.
And then something happened that no marketing department could have predicted. In the autumn of 2003, a radio was playing in one of Milan’s bars, and fans of the Belgian club Club Brugge, who had travelled for a Champions League match against AC Milan, began chanting the riff. They kept singing it on the terraces of the San Siro, and when Club Brugge’s forward Andrés Mendoza scored a goal, the riff became fixed as the team’s chant for every moment of good fortune.
The story might have remained a local curiosity if not for the 2006 match: Club Brugge hosted Roma in the UEFA Cup, the Italians won — and took home not just three points, but the melody too. Roma captain Francesco Totti later admitted that before that match he had never heard the song, and afterwards could not get the “po po po po po po” out of his head — that is what the track is called in Italy, where it has no usual English name, only an onomatopoeia. In 2006, the riff became the unofficial anthem of the Italian national team, which went on to win the World Cup, and by Euro 2008 it was already being played as the teams walked onto the pitch before every match.
The most remarkable thing in this story is the reaction of the author himself. Jack White did not simply fail to object to the terraces “stealing” his song — he called what happened one of the most beautiful things that can happen to a songwriter: the moment when a melody becomes folklore, loses its creator’s name, and passes into collective ownership. In his own words, it was precisely the absence of lyrics that made the riff a truly multicultural hit — anyone can chant it, regardless of language, just as the whole world once sang along, without translation, to the “na-na-na-na” of “Hey Jude.”
For the 2026 World Cup, which is taking place right now in North America, this story received a symbolic continuation: organisers made “Seven Nation Army” the official music for teams walking onto the pitch before matches — the track is broadcast to more than three billion viewers worldwide. White’s manager explained the decision simply: the song’s sporting life began with football, so its official recognition should come from there too.
“It’s Coming Home”: How a Comedy Show Wrote England’s Main Anthem
If “Seven Nation Army” is an example of chance adoption, “Three Lions” is the opposite story: a song written deliberately for football, but so honest in its sadness that it became something far bigger than a commissioned composition.
In 1996, the English Football Association approached Ian Broudie, frontman of the indie rock band The Lightning Seeds, with a request to write an anthem for the European Championship the country was hosting at home. Broudie wrote a melody he intuitively felt would work for terrace singing, and entrusted the lyrics to comedians David Baddiel and Frank Skinner, presenters of the cult football TV show Fantasy Football League. When the Association suggested having the footballers themselves sing on the record, Broudie refused: he did not want the song to sound nationalistic. In his words, the track was meant to speak not of victories, but of what it means to be a football fan — which, ninety per cent of the time, is the experience of losing.
That honesty became the formula for its success. “Three Lions” is not an anthem of triumph, but an anthem of hope in spite of experience: “thirty years of pain, ” but “I know that was then, but it could be again.” A curious detail: the original draft of the lyrics contained a line about defender Terry Butcher, who in 1989 played out a match with blood streaming from his head — a reference to one of the toughest episodes in English football. The line was later replaced with a less traumatic one, but the spirit of resilience remained woven into the fabric of the song.
The song went straight to number one on the charts on release, was reissued for the 1998 World Cup (Three Lions '98), and returned to the top of the charts in 2018 — twenty-two years after the original — setting a record: no song in the history of the British charts had returned to number one four times with the same line-up of performers. In 2026, to mark the track’s thirtieth anniversary, an anniversary reissue was released with new artwork and remixes — and England set off for the tournament once again with this song in its pocket.
It is interesting that the phrase “football’s coming home” does not refer to an expectation of victory, but to a historical fact: the modern game, as a codified sport, was born in England in the nineteenth century. The song does not promise a trophy — it recalls the roots of the game. Perhaps that is exactly why the irony and self-irony woven into the lyrics from the very start do not come across as arrogance, even to those who do not support England.
When the Metal Scene Writes a National Anthem Itself
Not every story is about football stealing a rock song. Sometimes musicians sit down and deliberately write a national team anthem themselves — and the result turns out surprisingly organic.
A characteristic example is the Swedish track “Nu Jävlar!” (“Here we go, damn it”), written for the 2020 European Championship at the request of Sweden Rock magazine. Soilwork vocalist Björn Strid was asked to write something for the national team — and he assembled an impressive line-up of guest musicians: members of King Diamond, Candlemass, Europe, former members of Entombed, as well as former Swedish footballer Jörgen Pettersson. The result was pure power metal — powerful, solemn, without a trace of the irony typical of British examples of the genre. The Swedish team made it out of the group stage on that energy, and went out just as quickly in the second round following a defeat to Ukraine.
A similar energy, but with a different sign — self-irony mixed with sincere pathos — runs through the track “Pasadena 1994” by Italian parody power metal band Nanowar of Steel. The song is dedicated to the 1994 World Cup final, which Italy lost to Brazil in Pasadena, USA — an event that Italian football fans still relive almost as a national tragedy. The recording features Joakim Brodén of Sabaton, a band whose reputation as chroniclers of military history makes it perfectly suited to singing about a footballing defeat as if it were an epic battle. The result is a track balanced between mockery and tenderness — a typically metal way of processing pain through hyperbole.
In Wales, things were taken more seriously. Manic Street Preachers wrote “Together Stronger (C’mon Wales)” as the official anthem of the Welsh national team for its historic first appearance at a European Championship — Euro 2016 in France. Part of the proceeds from the track went to a cancer research charity. A curious detail: the song was originally a reworking of the Frankie Valli classic “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You, ” but due to copyright complications the band had to go back to the drawing board. Wales, under this melody, reached the semi-finals of the tournament — the best result in the national team’s history.
The Spanish Paradox: A Country With No Words to Its Anthem
There is a separate story worth attention: Spain is one of only four countries in the world whose national anthem has no official lyrics. The “Royal March” (Marcha Real) is one of Europe’s oldest melodies, documented as far back as the eighteenth century. Over two and a half centuries, no set of lyrics ever emerged that satisfied everyone. The best-known attempt took place in 2008 — the version was withdrawn within days for lack of consensus.
Of the four wordless anthems in the world (Spain, Kosovo, San Marino, and Bosnia and Herzegovina), the 2026 World Cup features no fewer than two of them — the Spanish and the Bosnian — and both are silent for almost opposite reasons: the Spanish anthem because it is too old and never found a consensus; the Bosnian one because it was deliberately written without lyrics after the war of the 1990s, so as not to offend any of the country’s ethnic groups.
This textual vacuum, paradoxically, made Spanish terraces more receptive to imported rock folklore in stadiums. That is precisely why things like the Uriah Heep riff, adapted by fans of one of the Spanish-speaking clubs for chanting against Swiss side Basel, or the universal “We Will Rock You” and “We Are the Champions” by Queen, took root in Spain just as naturally as in Britain, which, in the general opinion of Spanish commentators, is where the very tradition of stadium singing originates. Filling the void where there is no native lyric turned out to be easier through a borrowed riff than through a new text set to an old melody.
A Goal Set to Rock: A New World Cup Tradition
For the 2026 tournament, a format took shape that did not exist just a few cycles ago: FIFA invited each national team to choose its own goal-celebration song, which plays in the stadium immediately after the ball hits the net. The idea was born at the 2022 Qatar World Cup as a way of narrowing the distance between football’s stars and ordinary fans: clubs had had their own stadium anthems and chants for decades, while national teams had never had that kind of stable sonic identity, beyond the official state anthem.
The list of chosen tracks turned out to be unexpectedly eclectic. Team USA chose classic Southern rock — “Free Bird” by Lynyrd Skynyrd: the host nation of the tournament picked a song almost half a century old as a symbol of its team’s emotional narrative. Germany went with an eighties synth-pop hit, “Major Tom” by Peter Schilling, a track German football has been reusing for years as a symbol of collective euphoria. Switzerland chose “Freed from Desire” by Gala — perhaps the most eloquent example of how a nineties dance song completely broke free of its original context and became a universal language of European football terraces.
At the time of writing, Spain had not yet presented its choice — joining it in this silence are the national teams of Cape Verde, Turkey, Algeria, Panama and Haiti. This alone shows that, for many federations, choosing the soundtrack for a goal is not a formality, but a matter of reputation that takes time.
Small Stories of a Great Love
Beyond the big official stories, there exists an entire layer of modest but no less sincere gestures — bands that wrote something about football not on commission from any federation, but simply because they love the game.
Rancid drummer Branden Steineckert fell in love with football almost by accident: a bandmate took him to a Real Salt Lake match in Salt Lake City in 2007. By the musician’s own admission, that game was entirely ordinary, but he ended up irrevocably hooked on the sport, and has attended almost every home match the team has played since. The tribute song he himself wrote for the club later became the official club anthem of Real Salt Lake — a rare case of a punk drummer’s amateur attachment turning into a fully-fledged club anthem.
A similar but larger-scale story is the collaboration between System of a Down bassist Shavo Odadjian, Cypress Hill rapper B-Real, and DJ Flict, for MLS club Los Angeles FC. Odadjian has said he fell in love with soccer as a sport long before this project, and found a particular connection specifically with LAFC from the very first match he attended; he described the collaboration with B-Real, a long-time friend, as mutual respect that turned into joint work.
San Diego trio Beekeeper released the four-track EP Group of Death specifically to mark Team USA’s entry into a group with Iran, England and Wales at the 2022 Qatar World Cup — the title of the track “The Cup is Not Coming Home” directly mocks the English “coming home, ” promising that the trophy will most certainly not be returning to Britain. The band themselves described the song as “typically brash American confidence” with a dose of old-school thrash — a genre that would seem the least suited to sporting optimism, but which works precisely for that reason as a statement of character.
There is a separate category: parodic genre gestures. Derby hardcore band Raised By Owls (performing under the name Lockdown HxC) recorded their own version of “Three Lions, ” translating the nineties classic into the language of aggressive hardcore with breakdowns — an example of how the same melody can exist simultaneously as a tender pop-rock original and as a genre-based mockery of the very idea of a football anthem.
Why This Works Specifically With Rock and Metal
If we ask why it is guitar music specifically — and not, say, classical music or jazz — that fuses so easily with football culture, the answer lies in the very mechanics of both phenomena. Both the football terrace and the rock concert are built on the same physiological principle: collective shouting, a rhythm that synchronises the bodies of strangers, and a sense of the temporary dissolution of individuality into the crowd.
A simple, repetitive riff — whether “Seven Nation Army” or an adapted Uriah Heep melody — fits perfectly into the structure of a stadium chant precisely because it requires no virtuoso command of language or voice. Knowing four or five notes is enough.
At the same time, the metal and punk scene, by its very nature suspicious of officialdom and commissioned products, treats football anthems without the usual cynicism precisely because most of the tracks that genuinely take root are not the result of a sponsor’s brief, but an organic seizure from below: the terraces themselves choose what to sing, and there is an honesty in that choice that no marketing plan can fake. A song either catches on spontaneously within six months, as happened with the Belgian fans in the Milan bar, or it dies within the first season, like the countless official anthems of major corporations and federations that today are remembered only by historians of curiosities.
Epilogue: The Terrace as the Last Living Concert Hall
There is a certain bitter irony in the fact that, in an age when live rock concerts compete with streaming, mood-based playlists and algorithmic recommendations, it is the football stadium that remains one of the few places where tens of thousands of strangers, in sync and without any command, perform a guitar riff written more than twenty years ago by a musician who never, in the slightest, thought about sport.
Perhaps that is the highest form of recognition a song can receive: not a chart position, not millions of streams, but the status of folklore — a melody whose author almost no one remembers anymore, but which is recognised from the very first notes on any continent, at any beer stand, on any terrace where, tonight, someone’s fate will be decided in ninety minutes.
